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Stanley William Hayter

London, England, 1901 - 1988, Paris, France

BiographyEnglish printmaker, draughtsman and painter, active in France and the USA. He came from a family of painters, including GEORGE HAYTER, but started his career by studying chemistry and geology at King’s College, London (1917–21). After graduating he worked in the Persian Gulf for several years for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1926 he settled in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian and studied burin engraving privately with the Polish artist Joseph Hecht (1891–1951), who also taught Anthony Gross. Hayter began to take his own pupils in 1927 and in 1933 named his workshop Atelier 17, after the street number of his studio in the Rue Campagne-Première. The hallmark of the workshop was its egalitarian structure, breaking sharply with the traditional French engraving studios by insisting on a cooperative approach to labour and technical discoveries. In 1929 Hayter was introduced to SURREALISM by Yves Tanguy and André Masson, who with other Surrealists worked with Hayter at Atelier 17. The often violent imagery of Hayter’s Surrealist period was stimulated in part by his passionate response to the Spanish Civil War (e.g. Combat, 1936; New York, Brooklyn Mus.; see ENGRAVING, fig. 9) and to the rise of Fascism. He organized portfolios of prints to raise funds for the Spanish cause, including Solidarité (Paris, 1938), a portfolio of seven prints, one of them by Picasso. Hayter exhibited frequently with the Surrealists during the 1930s, with works such as Rape of Lucretia (1934; see Black and Moorhead, no. 86), but left the movement when Paul Eluard was expelled. Eluard’s poem Facile Proie (1939) was written in response to a set of Hayter’s engravings. Other writers with whom Hayter collaborated in this way included Samuel Beckett and Georges Hugnet.

From Grove Dictionary of Art

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